Success doesn't have to mean sacrificing everything

What if sacrifice isn't the price of success — just a story we've been told?

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An executive says out loud what many executives believe privately: “I’m successful because I put work above everything else in my life.” The room — full of C-suite leaders — nods along.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece by a young entrepreneur took it even further, proclaiming that “Work-life balance will keep you mediocre.” He wrote, “In a winner-takes-all economy, extreme efficiency during your peak physical and mental years becomes a baseline for building wealth that lasts a lifetime.” Sacrificing time with family and personal relationships in college was, by his definition, necessary for success.

These aren’t fringe opinions. They’re the standard playbook of most people in corporate leadership. Ambition should hurt. The hardest worker wins.

This belief system treats sacrifice as proof of commitment — that the only way to earn your success is to give up everything else in pursuit of it. But what if it’s not a requirement for success? What if it’s just a story we’ve been told so many times that it feels like a fact?

The cost of the sacrifice narrative

I remember nights early in my career, furiously typing away at the keyboard late into the night. I had to be the best. I had to prove how hard I was willing to work. It was effective, because I received promotion after promotion in my corporate life. Work was everything — until I had kids. And thank goodness I did, because kids fundamentally changed my perspective about what was important.

You can’t have it all, as the saying goes. You’ve got to make choices about how you spend your time. But in addition to damaging relationships, the “sacrifice everything” model has measurable health costs. A study co-authored by researchers at Wharton and UC Berkeley examined the long-term effects of stress on CEOs’ health. The findings were stark: CEO lifespans decreased by 1.5 years after an industry-wide downturn. When insulated from intense market pressure, their lifespans increased by two years.

While the study focused on CEOs, the implications extend to other workers. The same pressures — long hours, high-stakes decisions, chronic stress — are present at every level of management. Middle managers, in fact, report the highest rates of burnout of any group, with 71% saying they feel burned out. The people on the path to becoming those corner-office leaders are already paying the price.

There’s a well-known adage that people don’t lie on their deathbeds thinking, “I wish I had worked more.” They wish they’d spent more time with the people they care about and doing the things they love. And, according to the research, intense overwork doesn’t just diminish the quality of life. It actually shortens its length.

Thankfully, the next generation is already opting out. There’s a term for what’s happening: “conscious unbossing.” According to DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025, Gen Z is 1.7 times more likely than other generations to step away from leadership roles to protect their well-being.

This is a rational response to watching their managers burn out and deciding the trade-off isn’t worth it. Younger workers have observed the sacrifice model up close — the missed family dinners, the 10 p.m. emails, the manager who hasn’t taken a real vacation in years — and they’re saying, “I don’t want that life.” They’re refusing to accept that suffering is a prerequisite for achievement.

And research consistently links work-life balance with higher job satisfaction and job performance — not lower. There’s no real evidence for the assumption that balance breeds mediocrity.

Redefining success on your own terms

The appropriate reframe to “success requires sacrifice” is that success requires clarity about what matters to you — and the discipline to protect it.

For employees:

The executives who wear sacrifice as a badge of honor are modeling a particular version of success. It’s not the only one. If your company’s culture treats burnout as a badge of honor, that tells you something about the company — not about what success requires.

If you’re being asked to sacrifice everything and told that’s just “what it takes,” consider whether the system is designed for your success... or for the company’s. After all, companies benefit from your overwork.

For self-employed people:

The sacrifice narrative can follow you out of corporate life. When you’re building something on your own, it’s easy to slip back into corporate habits — working around the clock because that’s what “dedication” looked like for years.

It’s also easy to compare yourself to others. I hear entrepreneurs brag about their revenue or how many hours they put into their business. I have to remind myself that another person’s definition of success is not the same as mine.

The advantage of working for yourself is that you get to define what success looks like, from top to bottom.

Final thoughts:

The people who say “you can’t succeed without sacrifice” may genuinely believe it. But their belief is self-reinforcing. The people who’ve made sacrifices point to their own sacrifice as evidence that it’s necessary. They made it to the top, and the cost was enormous, so the cost must have been required. It’s a circular argument.

What if the question isn’t “how much are you willing to sacrifice?” but “what kind of success are you building — and will you have space in your life to enjoy it?”

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